Category: In My Life
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A Year in England’s Last Wilderness
It’s been a year since I posted my last update, and we’ve been in our new home for 16 months, so I thought it time to let you know what we’ve been up to in our off-grid life. By the way that’s Molly in the photo (and our house in the background). When I posted […]
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2021 and Peakrill Press
2021 was a landmark year for us. After starting and ending a new job in Sheffield’s Moor Market at the end of 2020, I spent the year unemployed; the strangeness of COVID-19 bored on; and in June, we sold our house and left Sheffield, after 23 very happy years living there. We did not have […]
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What is the “Refugee Crisis”? And why should you care?
AKA: why are there suddenly refugees everywhere, and when are they going to go away? (Hint: never) This is a summary of the notes I took on the first day of the effect.org “Hacking the Refugee Crisis” expedition in Athens. More on that in a bit, but first… Crisis, What Crisis? Today, globally, there are […]
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Vibrant Sheffield
I recently attended Grant Thornton’s Sheffield “Vibrant Economy” Live Lab at the Millennium Galleries. This day-long workshop was intended to “bring together key leaders and influencers … to co-create a visionary identity for Sheffield and the wider city region”, posing the question “How can Sheffield become the innovation and creativity capital of Europe?” It’s easy […]
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Stewart Lee
Like most people, my first encounter with Stewart Lee was via his comedy and Fist of Fun. But the thing that first drew me to him was his taste in music.
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Sheffugees
This weekend I attended a “Sheffield refugee hackathon” organised by the folks at Yoomee. I really wasn’t sure what to expect, having never been to a hackathon before, and being unsure how well the fairly specific set of application-development skills I’ve been using over the last few years would generalise to building something that could […]
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Just Giving
No doubt you’ve noticed me spamming you these last few days with links to my charity fundraising page. This will be the last time, please read it… If you’re anything like me, you may well be thinking “yeah, yeah, doing something that you enjoy & would probably have done anyway, then claiming some noble cause […]
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No Riot Here
Last night, I went for a cycle ride around the inner suburbs of Sheffield. On the way, I started tweeting about the everyday scenes I was seeing, and the fact that there were no riots, using the #noRiotsHere hashtag (I plucked the hashtag out of thin air: it turns out one of two people had […]
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Desert Island Disco
A few weeks ago, Cherry Red Promotions very kindly asked me to play my Desert Island Discs at their monthly Desert Island Disco at The Shakespeare in Sheffield. Here are the tracks I picked, in the order in which I played ‘em. Lizzie also produced a little booklet, handed out on the night, and the […]
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I’m Qyper of the week!
A while ago, I signed up to review site Qype, but it was only last week that I really started using it. So it was a really nice surprise when today I got their weekly email newsletter (which, I have to admit, I normally kinda ignore) and saw that I’d been made Qyper of the […]